Islamist terrorists will increasingly target the US and its allies if the Barack Obama Administration does not seriously persist with dismantling the networks of Al Qaeda, its spawns and the Taliban
On Thursday, May 23, President Barack Obama announced at the United States National Defence University, the broad contours of what can be called a new American policy toward terrorism. While stating, “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organisations must continue”, he added that the United States had returned to the situation that existed before Al Qaeda toppled the World Trade Centre, when terrorism was a persistent but not existential danger. With Al Qaeda’s core now “on the path to defeat”, he argued, the United States must define its “effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle networks that pose a direct danger to us, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all the while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend.”
Two questions arise here. Is Al Qaeda on the path to defeatIJ Can a narrowing of the scope of the United States’ counter-terrorism effort to dismantling the networks that pose a direct danger to it and no more, workIJ As to the first question, Al Qaeda was proclaimed dead as early as 2001 when forces of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, led by the Americans and with massive US air support, compelled the Taliban and Al Qaeda to leave Afghanistan. Aided by Washington’s massive folly of staging the invasion of Iraq and America’s trusted non-Nato ally, Pakistan, it made a remarkable comeback and threw the American and allied forces in Afghanistan on the back foot. Again, despite the killing of Osama bin laden in a spectacular raid by US SEAls on May 2, 2011, and 22 of the 30 top Al Qaeda leaders that the United States had targeted, Al Qaeda and its spawns and affiliates are active and fighting.
Their violent surge has stalled in several parts of Africa. They, however, continue to strike. In fact, on May 23, the day President Obama announced his policy decisions, Islamist suicide bombers detonated two car bombs in Niger, for which the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, an Al Qaeda spawn, claimed responsibility. One of these, inside a military camp in the city of Agadez, killed 24 people, besides eight attackers.
The second attack, on a uranium mine run by the French-run nuclear company, Areva, in the remote town of Arlit, killed one person and injured 14. While Areva’s president, luc Oursel, has made it clear that the company will continue functioning in Niger despite the explosions, the very fact that the Movement for Oneness and Jihad could carry out the two attacks almost simultaneously and at places 100 miles apart, indicates that the outfit retains its organisational ability and very considerable striking power.
Significantly, even earlier, an attack from January 16 to 19, on the Amenas natural gas facility jointly owned by the British oil and gas giant BP Plc, Norway’s Statoil and Algeria’s State-run Sonotrach, in Algeria, led to the death of at least 23 hostages and 32 attackers. The Al Qaeda affiliate, Masked Brigade, claimed responsibility for the attack. Clearly, neither Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the main Al Qaeda franchisee in North Africa, nor any of its affiliates like Boko Haram in Kenya or Al Shabab in Somalia, can be written off; nor can the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula be assumed to be dead. If they are lying low, it is partly because of the severe losses they have suffered in conflict and partly because they want to preserve and quietly re-build their strength in anticipation of the withdrawal of the Western forces from Afghanistan and Africa.
That American troops will be pulled out — save for a small presence for intelligence-driven, targeted counter-terrorism operations and training — from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, is no secret. France has started withdrawing troops from Mali, a former colony of its, and is scheduled to hand over the country’s security to its own Army and a UN peacekeeping force, which will deploy in July ahead of planned nationwide elections. The number of French troops is expected to be down to 1,000 by the end of the year.
It remains to be seen how the United Nations’ Multidimensi- onal Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali, to be composed of 11,200 soldiers and 1,440 police officers, which is supposed to be deployed to help establish stability and to rebuild the Malian armed forces, fares. One has also to see how the operations against Al Qaeda spawns elsewhere in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, go after the Western withdrawal from Afghanistan and Africa. Till then, it will be premature to believe that Al Qaeda is on the path to defeat.
It is important to bear this in mind. Osama bin laden’s “letter to America” of November 2002, and other communications make it clear that Al Qaeda considers the United States to be the root cause of all evils confronting the world. He asks in the letter, “Is it in any way rational to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, then we will then leave her to live in peace and securityIJ” Also, as Bruce Riedel points out in The Search for Al Qaeda: Its leadership, Ideology and Future, the organisation’s ‘ultimate goal’ is to “create (or in its view to restore) the Islamic Caliphate from Spain to Indonesia, uniting all the lands of modern Muslim world and some territories lost in Christian reconquests over the past centuries. Although it has no blueprint for governing this caliphate, it plans to impose Sharia’h (Islamic law) on the model of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, whose Government rarely functioned in its brief history.”
To counter the objective, President Obama’s proposed “series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle networks that pose a direct danger to us, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all the while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend,” must cover the Al Qaeda, the Taliban and all their offshoots and affiliates. Otherwise, as underlined by the recent killing of a British and a French soldier in london and Paris respectively, and the attack on the Boston Marathon on April 15, terrorists will increasingly target the US and its allies at home.
(The accompanying visual is of fighters from the Al Qaeda-linked Islamist group, Ansar Dine, standing guard in Timbuktu in Mali. AP Photo)